The five prime movers behind the new Tuyo Theatre are in the middle of trying to articulate the happy accidents and artistic affinities that brought them all together, when a single word seems to bubble up in the room: chispa.

In Spanish, it means something akin to “spark” — although its meanings are actually “richer, deeper,” says Peter Cirino, who has gathered with his four fellow TuYo co-leaders to talk about the launch of their new, Latinx-centered company (the founders prefer that gender-neutral term for Latina/Latino).

“An ignition,” as Bernardo Mazón Daher, another member of the group, puts it.

The fact all five seem to embrace the chispa explanation by unanimous acclamation speaks to the egalitarian impulse that guides TuYo, which has no traditional leadership titles or roles but instead a “horizontal power structure,” says member Maria Patrice Amon.

With this unconventional approach, TuYo — whose own name means, roughly, “yours” — has its sights set on establishing a fresh beachhead for Latinx theater in this town: To quote the group’s mission statement, the five and their supporters intend to champion theater “that tells stories from and by diverse Latinx perspectives.”

The perceived shortage of those perspectives here — and the lack of a regularly producing Latinx company to help provide them — is what inspired the group to begin coalescing about two years ago.

“I was very active in the Latino theater communities in New York and Portland,” says Daniel Jáquez, a mathematician and actuary turned theater artist who moved here two years ago. “And then you come to San Diego and think it’s going to be very active, and it wasn’t.

“I wanted to see a theater company that produced with rigor and treated their artists professionally. And gave the artists who have a stake in a story the power to tell that story.”

Other companies around San Diego County have developed and staged Latinx-minded theater over the years, including artistic director and educator Willliam Virchis’ venerable Teatro Mascara Magica (which brings back its holiday tradition “La Pastorela” this week), and the San Ysidro-based, Chicano/a comedy troupe Teatro Izcalli.

San Diego Rep is also a longtime pioneer of producing Latinx plays and artists, starting with its groundbreaking Calafia Initiative and continuing more recently with its Amigos del Rep project, for which Amon serves as executive producer.

But the TuYo partners see an urgent need for a new, dedicated effort to keep Latinx theater front and center here.

The birth of the company — whose gradual rollout will include a February launch party — comes amid increased focus on diversity in the broader theater scene here, exemplified by a series of meetings that began last fall to help local performing-arts companies hash out and share their approaches to what’s called EDI, for equity, diversity and inclusion.

It also comes against the larger political backdrop of an often contentious national discussion over race and immigration, brought to the fore recently with the plight of Central American refugees traveling in caravans to the U.S. border through Mexico.

“I think it only makes it more urgent,” says TuYo co-founder Crystal Mercado, speaking of how such issues speak to the need for a response by artists.

“It has always felt important. But the sense of urgency, and just the sense of healing that we need, that our community needs,” is more present than ever, Mercado says.

“Seeing your story told onstage, and being reflected back at you — and it looks like you and it sounds like you — is healing. And it’s validating of your existence, and it’s empowering.

“(It says) that we’re here to stay, and that we matter.”

Finding connections

The chispa that brought the TuYo principals together was fueled by the fact most of them were already deeply rooted in local theater.

Mercado is a former education-programs manager at the Old Globe, and now a teaching artist there; she also has been running her own theater outfit, Bocón Arts. She met Mazón from their mutual work in Theatre for Young Audiences programs.

Mazón, for his part, had taken classes with Cirino at San Diego State, whom he considers a key mentor, and had talked several years ago about starting a company with Cirino and Amon; he also crossed paths with Jáquez once the latter moved to San Diego.

Jáquez was already in touch with Amon, partly because of mutual connections with the national Latinx Theater Commons (which all five are involved in).

And just to complete the circle, Amon — who has both a doctorate in theater and a law degree — has known Mercado since they were classmates at Sweetwater High School in the South Bay.

So, as Mazón puts it, “I think it was multiple chispas at the same time.” (A sixth founder, Evelyn Diaz Cruz, is taking a less active role for now due to outside demands.)

One of the founding goals was “to reflect a wide range of Latinx diversity within the group,” says Amon. “We have different relationships with immigration, different relationships with language.

“And that was really important when we were thinking about who to call into this group. We wanted to have a wide range of perspectives. It’s part of our mission — we want to reflect the breadth and diversity of the Latinx experience.”

The differences in backgrounds and outlooks among these artists who all identify as Latinx — a group that in our culture is often lumped into a monolithic, one-size-fits-all demographic — actually was a key theme of “Fade,” a play that Amon directed recently for Moxie Theatre as a TuYo co-production.

Such partnerships are likely to be TuYo’s key mode of producing for the time being; the company does not yet have its own venue, and it plans to establish more of a theatrical track record here before taking the further step of programming a fully produced season.

“So in this first year, we devised a series of five passion projects,” says Amon, “and partnered with another person in the group to produce it.” (The first two were “Self-Conchas,” which Mercado wrote with Wendy Maples and was a co-production with Bocón; and “Fade.”)

Ask these five when they first realized theater could be a powerful way to tell their own stories, and four of them point to the same key inspiration: Luis Valdez, the founder of the groundbreaking El Teatro Campesino and the man considered the godfather of Chicano theater.

For Amon, it was a staging of Valdez’s “Mummified Deer” at the Rep when she was still in high school: “It was like, WHAT? You can have a Chicano accent on the stage, and people don’t walk out?,” she recalls thinking.

For Mazón, it was a revival of Valdez’s “Zoot Suit” six years ago — also at the Rep. For Mercado, it was learning about the community-based ideals of Teatro Campesino in general.

And Cirino cites the playwright’s early work “Los Vendidos,” which he saw while in a Dallas theater program for at-risk youths.

“I said, ‘This is my story.’” Cirino recalls. “The hats I have to put on to survive just to get home, because it was pretty violent where I grew up. That one made me think there was another way to do things, other than sports — other than this violence I knew.”

The Mexico-born Jáquez name-drops what he calls “a weird one” as inspiration: “When ‘Evita’ opened on Broadway, I was in New York. And I totally fell in love with the character of Che,” the musical’s “everyman” narrator.

Now, as they team up to create their own work, “what we made sure we all believed in was this idea that we wanted to be kind of a wakeup call — that there’s so much out there that’s being left unsaid and unseen,” says Cirino.

Jáquez emphasizes that “we’re committed to paying our artists. If our mission is for professional artists to stay here (in San Diego), we need to stand up for that.”

For Amon, TuYo’s mission “defies the vitriol of the contemporary rhetoric. It stands in direct defiance of what we hear going on in the popular media.”

Mercado picks up that thread: “Just our presence here, being a group of Latinx artists in this non-hierarchical way to run a company and tell stories — that’s an act of defiance. It’s an act of revolution.”

And, she adds with a smile: “I’m all about it.”

Coming up at TuYo Theatre

“The Fuñata,” March 2019: San Diego playwright-performer Ric Oquita tells the story of how his father invented a “nonviolent piñata.”

“The UN-documented Project,” April-May, 2019: A multimedia project “aspiring to reclaim an American identity for individuals who are not native to the U.S.”

“Papá está en la Atlántida”/”Our Dad is in Atlantis,” unscheduled workshop: The play by Javier Malpica, translated by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, focuses on two young brothers whose father emigrates to the United States, leaving them behind in Mexico. The piece will be performed in both Spanish- and English-language versions, staged in repertory.